In the playhouses of eighteenth-century France, clerks and students, soldiers and merchants, and the occasional aristocrat stood in the pit, while the majority of the elite sat in loges. These denizens of the parterre, who accounted for up to two-thirds of the audience, were given to disruptive behavior that culminated in full-scale riots in the last years before the Revolution. Offering a commoner's eye view of the drama offstage, this fascinating history of French theater audiences clearly demonstrates how problems in the parterre reflected tensions at the heart of the Old Regime.Jeffrey S. Ravel vividly depicts the scene in the parterre where the male spectators occupied themselves shoving one another, drinking, urinating, and confronting the actors with critiques of the performance. He traces the futile efforts of the Bourbon Court and later its Enlightened opponents to control parterre behavior by both persuasion and force. Ravel describes how the parterre came to represent a larger, more politicized notion of the public, one that exposed the inability of the government to accommodate the demands of French citizens. An important contribution to debates on the public sphere, Ravel's book is the first to explore the role of the parterre in the political culture of eighteenth-century France."

Drawing on unusual archival materials, addressing a variety of nonliterary or extratextual sources, employing new theoretical approaches, and offering innovative discussions of established works, the essays gathered in the latest volume of "Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture" reflect the most exciting new directions of research within the field.

The novel is a dominant focus, and the contributors to this volume offer new perspectives on the genre itself or bold new readings of such canonical texts as "Les Liaisons dangereuses," "Cecilia," "Histoire de M. Cleveland," and the early fiction of Daniel Defoe, as well as Casanova's novelistic autobiography, "Histoire de ma vie." Some essays use unusual or little-known sources or materials: --the early English novel, "The Jamaica Lady"; an anonymous British seaman's journal; and "infant's petitions," the letters that accompanied babies left at foundling hospitals. Other essays examine the complicated constructions of identity and authorship that emerge in various disciplines and genres: depictions of statuary in eighteenth-century French painting and literature; representations of the French literary marketplace; the role of singing in the poetry of Stephen Duck; the presence of ancient Stoic and Baconian principles in Samuel Johnson's moral writing; and the complicated correspondence between Horace Walpole and William Cole. The volume concludes with a special section of essays meditating on the complex eighteenth-century discourse on beauty and aesthetics.

Contributors: Jeffrey Barnouw, Barbara Benedict, Melissa Downes, Ted Emery, Timothy Erwin, Susan Greenfield, George Haggerty, Adam Komisaruk, Laurence Mall, James Mullholland, Alexander Pitosfsky, David Porter, Neil Saccamano, Laura Schattschneider, April Shelford, Peter Sonderen, Geoffrey Turnovsky, Caroline Weber